23: On The Road

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In a caravan, the carts are usually ordered from lightest to heaviest, to help prevent carts getting bogged down or stuck. Which means that as they set off, Tyk finds herself in the lead, with her mother all the way at the back and the entire caravan between them. With Ketoi and Kehta high in the sky to scout for any danger ahead and her own father flitting between her horns and the path immediately in front to check for steady ground, she puts her weight to the yoke and heads away from the Redstone River Hive. Smon walks beside her, long bamboo stick in her claws, ready to help shove the cart over any tricky patches or move small stones and overgrown vegetation out of the way. Her vertical body orientation makes her look comically large next to the carts. She even looks broader than normal, covered as she is in layers of silks and bags full of supplies. When not using it to assist with the cart, she uses her bamboo stick to help her pick her own way forward.

The tracks to follow are clear; two parallel grooves of packed soil for the thick cartwheels to rest in, leading North, up to the forests of tall, strong bamboo that the Redstone River Hive is so well known for. The wide, cushioned wheels of the cart roll smoothly in the ruts worn by generations of labour, and the rolling weight of it isn’t all that much to handle. It takes about half a day to get to the place where their path to the Green Hills Hive diverts from the path to the bamboo logging site, and from there, the job becomes significantly slower and more exhausting. The tracks are difficult to see, overgrown with mosses and filled with loose soil over time; traders don’t come through often enough to keep them clear. With the help of Kesan’s eyes, Smon and Bette walk out ahead to clear what they can with stick and mandibles, staying close enough to come back and help give Tyk or Ayan’s cart a pull or shove as necessary. The lighter carts sufficiently compact the tracks for the heavier ones to follow without issue. As they work, Bette saves anything tasty or nutritious they happen to run across, tossing morsels of moss and too-slow vermin into the sacks on her back; Smon pulls up grasses and mosses that Bette doesn’t want for the cooking pot in her farm.

Proper traders would walk all day, but their caravan finds themselves taking a lot of breaks. Halfway through the first afternoon, Tyk can already hear the scouts begin to talk worriedly about their speed, and recalculate the estimated length of the journey. Tyk hopes that they make it to Green Hills Hive before any sky people are sent across. The sky people were going to wait there and cross in a group, so as long as they get there with plenty of dry season left, before the river becomes unsafe, then they should be fine.

They stop well before nightfall to have time to forage and dig a rough burrow for the night. While most of the party fans out to see what they can find to add to Bette’s small collection of foraged food, Tyk helps San and Ohta, the largest of the scouts, dig the burrow. Smon busies herself changing things about in her own little farm (every time they stop, she’s moving the contents between the containers or adding new vegetation to heat up) and filtering out some sort of goop that seems to count as food for her. The foragers come back just as they finish digging the burrow, and Tyk picks through her share of barely palatable bugs and leaves before settling down for the night. (They do have food in the carts, but it’s best to live on forage as much as they can. Nobody wants to be halfway between two burrows and suddenly find that they’re out of food and there’s nothing to forage.) They drink freely of the small amount of water they’ve brought; the road curves back closer to the river ahead, and they expect to reach it again late tomorrow afternoon. If anything, using up their stores lightens the load marginally.

There have not been all that many occasions where Tyk has slept in a large, heavily occupied burrow. Usually, it’s just her and her parents. There have also not been all that many occasions where she’s slept in such a pitiful excuse for a burrow; the sleeping space they hurriedly scraped out while the majority of the party were foraging could be better described as a ditch, and what roof exists is liable to collapse at any moment. It doesn’t escape Tyk that Smon, wary of underground spaces and, as she once explained to Tyk, unable to breathe in either water or collapsed earth, posts herself as close to the entrance as possible, using her layers of silk, the dirt wall on one side, and Mir’s body on the other, as her only protection against the wind. Further back in the burrow, pressed between her mother and Ohta, Tyk settles down to rest and falls asleep immediately.

She wakes slowly, to pain all over – not the pain of sickness, but the pain of overwork. Who knew that pulling a cart could be so exhausting? They’re one day into their journey, and Tyk’s already been dispelled of any lingering suspicion that her birth star might indicate that her future lies in trading. There is absolutely no way that she’s going to spend her life doing this.

People are having a discussion nearby. An argument? No. Just a very clipped sort of discussion.

“We have to send two back,” Ohta says. “There is simply no way that we’ll make it like this.”

“The hive won’t be happy,” Toi says. “This might be their only option as trading for awhile.”

“Well, they can eat sand about it. If the hive wants to trade goods, they can send more people, or wait for our actual traders to come home and send those. But we’re not traders, and I think that yesterday showed perfectly clearly that none of us are up to pulling these carts all day. Look at this crew; half of the women can barely move. Furthermore, at our pace, wasting so much time each night on foraging isn’t viable. We need people free to work shifts in pulling, to clear the tracks ahead, to forage on the go. If we free up two more women from the carts then between them, the five men, and the skyborn, we should be able to cover everything and move a lot faster. But dragging six carts is simply not going to work.”

And so two carts loaded with trade goods are left behind, their fastest flier Kemir is sent back to tell the hive where to pick them up (he’ll rejoin them in another day or two), and with tired, reluctant muscles, the party set off again.

The journey is much, much easier with only four carts. Takings shifts with the heavy work of pulling means that the carts move faster, means they need shorter rests, and frees up more people to clear the path and forage. Furthermore, being able to forage so much on the go means less foraging when they make camp, so they can camp later and more people can dig the camping burrow. They reach the river ahead of schedule, making better progress than they expect, although still much less than traders would.

The third night is particularly lucky, as they’re just about to make camp when Ketoi spots a trader’s burrow in the distance, a properly mortared camp that traders on the trail use and maintain on their journey on the route. They push the distance and spend the night in a proper burrow that nobody has to dig.

“I’m just saying,” Mir jokes as they divide up the forage, “if we can make trader time, we can reach one of these burrows every night.”

“Sounds great,” San says. “You pull the heavy cart at trader speeds and we can make it happen.”

“Being careful is more important than a nice burrow,” Ayan says. “The hive entrusted this mission to us, and we’re already two carts lighter than they wanted. We owe it to them to at least complete the rest of the mission successfully. Rushing risks breaking the carts, and we only have so many repair supplies with us.”

“If the hive want to trade so many goods so badly, they should’ve sent the hiveheart to pull the carts,” Ohta says, causing both Ayan and Tyk to gasp at the irreverence. “I’d love to see old Nathi try to drag one of these things. I told them all along that six was too many, but does anybody listen to me? Of course not.” She crunches a giant beetle open and gulps down the innards. “Smon, do you have carts on your Earth?”

“Ah. Yes, but they’re different. Bigger, and they move by themselves.”

“Like down hills or something?” Kehta asks. “Or do they fly on the wind like pollen?”

“No, they have… uh, it’s like my magic stones. We take… magic… from taking the fire out of special stones, and we put it in the carts to make them move.”

“You know, for someone who’s not a star, you sure do use a lot of magical light and fire. You’re not lying to us about not being a god, are you?”

Smon laughs. “Silly thing to lie about.”

“That’s not a ‘no’,” Ohta says with a humorous horn tilt.

“Our carts have different tracks,” Smon continues. “Long rods of metal for wheels to go on. The carts slide on the rods. You hook up a whole lot of carts to one moving cart and have it pull it, one cart to pull a whole caravan on the metal tracks.”

“Stars above, where would you get so much metal?” Kesan asks. “There wouldn’t be enough metal on the continent to link Redstone River Hive and Green Hills Hive, let alone the other hives. And how much work would that take?”

“Big many… I mean, a lot of work. But we move so many carts everywhere, all time, on my Earth. So having the tracks makes it more easy. Not worth it for you, but you do have enough metal. Lots of metal around, you just don’t… harvest… it.”

“We see occasional nuggets of metal in the river,” Tyk says, “but – ”

“The red sands in Redstone River. The sand is red from metal. The same metal that nails are made from. Deep Bog Hive probably harvest it from the river and build it into stones to make into nails. Problem is not not enough metal; problem is how hard it is and how much fire you need to turn it from red dirt to stone.”

After a beat of silence, Ohta says, “That’s it, I’m not asking you questions any more. Every answer you have is weirder than the previous one.”

After querying Tyk for the definition of ‘weirder’, Smon laughs again. “All things here are weird to me. When we see your ocean from up in the sky, everyone is… is… we not know what to think.”

“The ocean?” Ayan asks. “What about it?”

“Is full of – ” Smon hooks her arms about each other in a complicated sort of tangle to indicate the huge thorn-covered structures that grow thick in the water between continents. Tyk has never seen the ocean herself, but the descriptions have never sounded stranger to her than descriptions of mountains, or the wingsong stream. Perhaps Smon’s Earth doesn’t have oceans?

“Of course,” Bette says. “Where else would seastone come from? If the oceans weren’t like that, we wouldn’t be able to filter crop water and we’d starve every winter.”

“Normal to you,” Smon says. “Weird to me.”

Just how different is Smon’s Earth? Tyk wonders. And what will an entire hive of her people do to this one?

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